To be or not to be - with a virtual identity.

When I started to work on the first essay about my media usage it became clear quite quickly that a major part of the report would describe the role of social networking. This surprised me as in the past I would heavily disagree with living my life online and becoming dependent on this virtual community. The more I thought about how often I really used social networking sites and what impact they had on my everyday life I realized that I had put a lot more time and trust into this phenomenon than I originally gave it credit for. I finished the essay and despite spending some of the 1000 words writing about Facebook with a ciritcal edge it made me think and analyse my online actions a little bit more. I thought to myself: what do I actually get out of being networked with friends, colleagues and people I might have only seen once, but that made a great addition to my friends-count? It dawned one me that I WAS creating an online identity and that it went in line with the development I had naturally made since coming to university. I wanted to be part of it. Well, at least for the first few weeks (maybe even months, although I don’t really like admitting that). Thinking back to how I engaged in non-stop status updating and making sure enough photos were taken in any one night out to be uploaded and create a decent photo album, yes, I definitely was a good example for a student who was trying to prove a point through social networking.

At university, Facebook is everywhere. Every faculty, course, society and of course, every student has an account. But why is this way of communicating so popular and why do we try not only to gain “real” friends but also prove to them online how many other people are competing against them in contests like: “Who likes more of my statuses?”, “Who gets more tags in the latest photo album?” or “Which person will I possibly even add as my virtual sister or brother?”.
I think it is to do with the fact that many of the insecurities we have in real life and face-to-face interaction are simply cut out. We don’t apply the same kind of modesty when it comes to how many people we actually do interact with. In a face-to-face conversation we would hardly tell our opponent about the brief chat with the guy from our course which now results in knowing him enough to say hello next we meet him. Neither would we explain the exact poses of every single photo we have taken with 35 different people in only one night. On Facebook, it’s much easier. We add the guy we had the chat with to our friends and upload all photos of the night. This is much more subtle, however, maybe even more effective than the real life conversation. We act like we’re just trying to give our friends the opportunity to look at what we have been up to and share those great moments with them and the guy the possibility to stay in touch. How generous of us. Well, really, we’re showing off. We all know about this condition but there is a secret truce that nobody can ever speak about that side of sharing, tagging and adding. Strange.

Personally, I am glad that this initial period of stress about keeping up to date with all online developments is over. I have gone back to focusing on real life experiences but still remain to keep an interested, however, amused eye on this virtual identity provider, they call “Facebook”.